This might be a stretch, but…. Staying after school is a good thing. What? you say. But you want to get home, relax, get a snack, play outside, see your friends, watch a movie, take a nice warm shower–lots of things! One of the things you don’t want to do is stay after school. Usually if you do it’s because you have to for negative reasons–like getting in trouble, or retaking a test, or extra credit for missing out on X number of standard homework assignments because you slacked off. Never for your own sake.
This is the quiet plea to the true meaning of learning. Let’s paint a picture here: you see this teacher dealing with all these kinds of students. One, you’ve got the “nobody kid” who just nods off in class. As a teacher, you don’t care much for that, but you deal as best as you can. Maybe the kid can eek by. Then you have the “goofballs,” the ones you have to shoot horse tranquilizers just to get them settled down and have them listen to at least one word you say. As long as you secretly pass some melatonin into their drinks during lunch, they might actually survive your class. But check this one type of student out:
The “gifted one.” Sometimes this student is the “popular one,” too. He or she has got all the looks, incredibly smart, dedicated, personable, every one likes him or her. This student also has an unbreakable desire to study something he or she loves. That’s exactly what gets him or her in class after school. They want to excel. They want to succeed.
As a student, this question is posed for you: what kind of student do you want to be? A nobody? A goofball? Or gifted? You decide….